- We Bought a Zoo. Written and directed by Cameron Crow. Starring Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Colin Ford and Elle Fanning.
Rating: 5 (out of 10)
THE names Matt Damon and Kevin James should never be printed in the same paragraph, Zookeeper being my official pick for worst film of 2011, yet the actors' latest films have more than their onscreen profession in common.
The animals in Damon's We Bought A Zoo don't talk back, thank God, and Adam Sandler is in no way involved in the project, but there is enough farce contained in Cameron Crowe's script to merit comparison to James' pile of monkey hooey.
Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a man still grieving over the loss of his wife six months previous, and coping with two children as best he can. Son Dylan (Colin Ford) is drawing disturbing pictures at school, and little Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) can't sleep at night because of the partying next door. Benjamin decides to chuck his job as a thrillseeking journalist and move out to the California countryside.
Much of the early part of the film hinges on Rosie's cuteness: Rosie makes the lunches and doles out adorable nuggets of wisdom; Rosie says yea or nay as they drive around looking at houses (with the world's most annoying real estate agent). And it's Rosie, while feeding peacocks and bathed in golden light, that makes Benjamin decide to buy a house that just happens to come with 47 species of animals and hefty vet bills.
It also comes with built-in romantic opportunities in the form of head zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) and her 13-year-old home-schooled niece Lilly (Elle Fanning), whose only purposes are to coax the boys out of their emotional funk.
The motley crew living on the property also includes a temperamental Scot (Angus McFadyen) so volatile that two men have to hold him in a closet, and he breaks the door to splinters anyway, and a guy with a monkey on his shoulder (Patrick Fugit, Crowe's hero in Almost Famous), who is the most reasonable character on board. I almost included Ken Jeong as the slimy snake wrangler, but that's the other Zoo film. My bad.
Just when you thought the characters couldn't get more excessive, in walks John Michael Higgins as the much-feared zoo inspector. There's not an ounce of subtlety here, as Higgins' character leers at Kelly and extends his custom tape measure across the tiger enclosure, playing a mine-is-biggerthan-yours with Benjamin. This happens more than once, by the way, in case you didn't chuckle the first time.
And so the night noises go from drunken parties to the sounds of a tropical paradise, but elsewhere the action is far less subtle: the lasagne-toting mom at school is too forward; home-schooled Lilly is too weird; the Scot is too manic; Rosie is too cute; and the inspector is too much of everything. And Kelly? She's as one-dimensional as they come, as Benjamin grows more in his relationship with a dying tiger than in their spontaneous romance.
Everywhere I thought there might be a surprise in this movie about loss and risk, there wasn't. "All you need is 20 seconds of courage," Benjamin tells his son. But really, all Crowe needed was 20 minutes of edits to make this the touching film it was intended to be. At least the animals don't talk back.
